Douglas Weathersby’s installations tend to focus on the detritus of everyday life, especially where it intersects with his performance work about chores like home repair and cleaning. Often these installations are so ephemeral – such as dust and wallpaper from home renovations – that their creation is only preserved through photographs or video.

The term installation art is fluid. In general, it has been defined as art that is or has been arranged in a place, either by the artist or as instructed by the artist. The term is a loose one as it embraces diverse materials, subjects and manifestations. In a way, one characteristic of installation art is the immersion of the viewer in the artwork. In other words, the viewer interacts physically with the work of art, such as walking into a room that has been converted into a stage setting, or removing pieces of candy from a large sculpture. Another trait of installation art is how very transitory it can be. Often, when a work is dismantled it is destroyed. A work of installation art can be recreated – perhaps from the artist’s instructions – but it will never be quite the same piece.

Douglas Weathersby, Virtual Home Office, 2007. Multi-media, site-specific installation, Aqua Art Miami, December, 2007

Photo courtesy of Solomon Projects

For example, one of the most talked about exhibits at the recent Art Basel Miami Beach was the Chinese supermarket recreated in the ShanghART gallery space by Shanghai artist Xu Zhen. This recreated market was stocked with empty containers of easily recognized brands which visitors could purchase and remove. By the end of the fair, the store resembled a convenience store emptied by panicked shoppers preparing for a major storm – it was a transformed work of art.

Xu Zhen, Supermarket 2007

Photo courtesy ShaghART Gallery.

Xu Zhen’s comment on how art can be interchanged with commodity has its roots in the development of installation art as a whole. Coming of age in the 1960s and early 1970s along with conceptual and performance art, installation art was part of the larger movement to create art that would be difficult to treat solely as tradable goods. Artists purposely worked with found objects and unusual substances to make the buying and selling of artwork more difficult.

Installation art generally exists in a particular place at a particular time. Although this art form became fully developed only thirty years ago, it can trace its lineage to the early twentieth-century European avant-garde, notably the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Schwitters assembled diverse and bizarre objects into several rooms of his home in Germany, turning the whole into a cabinet of curiosities called “Merzbau,” (www.merzbau.org). Bombing raids during World War II pulverized the home and the installation, which survives now only through photographs.

Like Schwitters’ Merzbau, contemporary works of installation art will change when moved to a new site. They may need to be altered to fit a new space, and even when precisely recreated, may look different. Variations in light or ceiling heights can either dwarf or exaggerate scale and even because of the nature of the flooring can have an impact; the warm tones of a wood floor for example, will lend a very different feel than the harsh gray of concrete or the tactile surface of carpet. Often the only physical object remaining from an installation is the photographic image (called an installation shot or installation photograph). Since a work of installation art tends to be of a place, this type of work is more likely to be commissioned and collected by institutions or collectors with the space and means to maintain it permanently.

A great place to see several types of installation art is The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami (www.margulieswarehouse.com). The collector, Martin Z. Marguilies has spent over thirty years collecting contemporary sculpture in both traditional and very non-traditional lines. The Margulies Collection offers the opportunity to see the works of now-established pioneers, as well as that of the youngest of contemporary artists. A striking piece is the crumbling miniature city installed by Russian artist Peter Belyi. Entitled Danger Zone, the once-tall, vital, Soviet housing buildings stand starkly, reduced to framework, strewn with rubble, reminding the viewer of the rise and fall of great social empires and the transience of human ambition.

Peter Belyi, Danger Zone, 2007 - Drywall and mixed media installation, approximately 14 ft. x 10 ft high

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery - Property of the Margulies Collection

Looking at the powdered stone and the broken pillars of Danger Zone recalls the practical viewer’s first question – what do you get? While installation art was an attempt to undermine the easy buying and selling of art as commodity, it is now, nonetheless a commercial product. It is, however, a product with a twist; collecting and preserving installation art presents several unique challenges. First, there is the conservation of the materials used in any work. In the case of using found objects, particularly twentieth-century mass-produced objects, conservators are only beginning to understand how these new materials degrade or change over time. Institutions like the Getty Conservation Institute have started to analyze the materials used in modern art and to explore their preservation.

For the collector looking to buy a work of installation art, there are several factors to consider in addition to conservation. Where will the work be installed? Who will install it? Can it be moved? Will the artist or gallery be available to assist in installing the piece? What technology is required with the piece? Communicating with the gallery, asking detailed questions, and requesting documentation or instructions for an installation work should be intense, perhaps more so than when adding more traditional types of work to a collection.

A good case study of the many aspects of acquiring installation art can be found in a case study presented by the Tate Modern in England. The Tate, along with the Getty and other modern art institutions, has pioneered collecting and conserving contemporary art as well as publishing their research findings. The case study chronicles the Tate’s 2003 purchase of Carlo Garaicoa’s installation, Letters to the Censors (Carta a los sensors)(www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/garaicoa/home_1.htm) from Lombard-Freid Fine Arts at Art Basel Miami. The work consists of a large model of a building complete with a lighted chandelier and small human figures. Video images are projected from inside the model onto the walls around the exhibition space.

Once shipped to the Tate, several challenges for permanent exhibit became apparent that were not evident when the work was installed at a fair. First, a number of small pieces were broken and lost in transit. Then, the electrical wiring was not up to British safety standards and had to be reworked. Plus, the artist had discovered that projection equipment inside the model building was causing an unacceptable high temperature in the model so that the roof would warp. In the end, it took a team of curators, conservators, electricians and artists to work out these challenges and make the installation both stable and accessible for long-term exhibition.

For collectors, artworks created as installation art present a challenge in space and resources that is wholly unique from other forms of contemporary art, yet the experiences to be found in these evocative pieces makes it well worth the effort.

Additional resources:

• "Should We Reproduce the Beauty of Decay? A Museumsleben in the work of Dieter Roth" by Heide Skowranek, www.tate.org.uk.

• "The Management of Display Equipment in Time-base Media Installations" by Pip Laurenson, www.tate.org.uk.

• "Research Projects: Inside Installations: the preservation and presentation of installation art", www.tate.org.uk.

Galleries websites:

www.solomonprojects.com

www.shanghartgallery.com

www.daneyalmahmood.com